“It’s like a paid vacation”: the acting style Robin Williams called a gift
It always seemed like Robin Williams could do everything. As a stand-up comedian, he is legendary and one of the greatest to ever grace the stage. As a comedic actor, bar a few mishaps like Popeye and Bicentennial Man, he was untouchable, capable of delivering some of the biggest laughs in cinema history. To top it all off, he was an incredible dramatic performer, too. Anyone who’s seen Good Will Hunting or Dead Poets Society won’t be forgetting that in a hurry.
To some, however, he will always be remembered as an incredible voice actor. His magnum opus is his whirlwind turn as the Genie in Disney’s Aladdin, a comedic H-bomb that showed the full force of Williams’ brilliantly unhinged mind. Outside of the inhabitant of the lamp, he also voiced Fender in Robots, Dr Know in AI Artificial Intelligence, and Batty Koda in FernGully: The Last Rainforest. He might not have used the same voice every time, but through his unmatched energy, you always knew it was him.
Another vocal-only gig for Williams was the ‘Happy Feet’ franchise. Tired of making films about cars and the end of the world, George Miller decided to direct a series of movies about dancing penguins instead. Williams voiced a number of characters across both instalments, including Ramón, a Spanish-accented Adélie penguin and Lovelace, a rockhopper penguin who acts as the heroes’ spiritual guide. To promote the release of Happy Feet Two, Williams spoke to HeyUGuys, where he was asked if he was done with live-action movies to focus more on animations.
“I still like to act,” he assured the interviewer. “I did a film with Robert De Niro recently called The Big Wedding.” That came out in 2011, by the way, and was absolutely awful. Despite acknowledging his desire to keep working in live action, Williams was full of praise for voice acting. “Doing the voice is a gift,” he remarked. “It’s literally like a paid vacation where you go to Australia and work with these guys for two weeks and then come back. The weird thing is how long it takes – three years. I think when we did the first sessions, it was a year ago since we did the last session.”
Voicing a talking penguin isn’t something that comes naturally to a person, so Williams had to devise his own techniques to get into character. “It’s a small fierce side of myself!” he said of Ramón. “Being a hopeless romantic of my own and in real life, I’m lucky to have my own Carmen.”
When it came to Lovelace, he said he modelled his performance on Barry White and the religious figures he remembered from his childhood. “I grew up in Detroit, so I heard a lot of Baptist preachers,” he revealed. “I could find that voice very easily”.
Williams isn’t the only major actor to display a preference for voice acting. Before he was Vision in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Paul Bettany voiced J.A.R.V.I.S, Tony Stark’s helpful AI assistant. He told Digital Spy in 2012 that he spent about “half-an-hour” recording voice lines for the first ‘Avengers’ movies.
“It’s the best job I’ve ever had,” he said. “I say the lines, and they pay me money.” Needless to say, he was probably less than thrilled when he had to do some actual acting in a big red bodysuit.
